The Crater Chronicles

Nail in the Coffin

Claustrophobic.

I had suspected it, but had never come to accepting my own diagnosis until my first visit to New Vulkan. At first, I was fine, and curious only to see how "the other half" lived, but as time drifted past, I noticed a cold sweat beading between my shoulder blades. In ignorance, I tried to rationalize it as a side effect of the unknowns that dogged my footsteps.

Surely, I presumed, I was concerned for the ever-present danger faced by my companions and I. Or, I worried of the forces that would see us dead and forgotten in some anonymous drift of snow.

As Cyril and I walked, the heat that had first been a welcome relief to frozen bones began to become oppressive. The stone walls had taken on an air of sameness, and I could not shake the feeling that we were descending an eternal ramp that would lead us out the other side of the earth.

Upon voicing my concerns, Cyril laughed and mocked my apparent geological ignorance. Per him, one could never walk through the earth, as its heart was made of fire. Metal, he claimed, that was so hot it turned to a liquid. Ironic, that this frozen hellhole encompasses such heat. After he finished his long and unwarranted geography lesson, I downplayed my mistake as metaphor.

The satisfaction of seeing him redden at the ears for having just lectured me based on a "metaphor" was enough to occupy my mind for a minute or two more before the uneasiness set back in.

6 more miles, he said.

The mere thought of venturing that much further from the comfort of open space was terrifying. In a moment of panicked delirium, I thought "I want to go home" for what must have been the first time in years. It was more an appeal to escape than a desire to return to a concrete home. At that moment, I would have preferred to be anywhere else.

I missed the cold.

A thought I spent most of my life thinking would go unrealized, but there it was. I was warm, but it was not a comfortable warmth. I would have preferred the distant heat of a dying fire to the stifling heat filling the narrow corridor.

At length, the tunnel gave way to a massive cavern holding a city like I had never seen before. Even amidst my terror at the rock constraining me, I was impressed.

"Cyril, I d-digress, I didn't expect this from you trogs."

He cracked a slight grin. "Like I've been telling you this whole time, the only troglodytes are you primitive surface-dwellers."

I nodded, not trusting myself to spit out anything intelligible, and tried to take in the whole view. The sort of buildings the Old Fellows would have called skyscrapers became ceiling-scrapers, connecting the top and bottom of the cavern through steel. More impressive to me was the dim yellow light shining from their intact windows. Electricity, and glass. Both almost unheard of Craterside.

Signs, neglected but not degraded, lined the many paths winding through the city. I presumed they were meant to ease the task of navigation, but what little I could puzzle out with my limited literacy amounted to little more than jargon.

I could not spend much time admiring the sight however, as we had pressing matters to attend to, and I was eager to return to the freedom of the icebound ruins. New Vulkan held secrets, but it also held answers-answers that I yearned for with all the desperation of the starved.

-Excerpt from the journal of a "Marin Kitania" found tucked away inside a large backpacking pack containing several other oddities. Undated. Assumed to be chronologically subsequent to previous excerpt.